April 8, 2004 --The Spring 2004 issue of the Virginia Quarterly
Review is in the mail and it’s
not your grandfather’s VQR.

The
latest issue of the VQR, one of the oldest literary journals
in the country, is the second issue to appear under its new
editor, Ted Genoways, 31, with a
totally new look – a glossy cover and higher-grade paper, lots of color
and new graphic elements. The Spring 2004 issue shows a full-color, comic book
hero bursting the chains that bind him. Yes, Virginia, you can tell a book by
its cover.

“We
publish in a tough environment today, “ says Genoways, “with
competition not only from other literary journals, but from the fast-paced
lives that so many people lead. Our goal is to make VQR a
must read, to invite our
readers to travel with us beyond the headlines to a thoughtful, creative,
intellectually exciting place.”

Genoways
took over as editor of the VQR last July, replacing Staige
D. Blackford,
who had been at the helm for 28 years. Blackford died last year at 72.

Genoways
faces the dual challenge of preserving the journal’s
strengths, which have kept it in print for 79 years, while
creating new features to appeal
to young readers. What is the editorial mix that will lure readers from
the Greatest Generation to Gen-X?

He
sees a strong graphic character as a vital element of the
new design. Not only
does the current issue present
the comic book story of “The Origin
of the Escapist,” by Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Michael Chabon
and illustrator Eric Wight, but the newly created VQR Galleries offers
seven pages of stunning
Japanese woodblock prints from the University of Virginia Art Museum’s
exhibit, “The Moon Has No Home.” And artist Nick Bantock
contributes an intriguing project, “Urgent 2nd Class, Creating
Faux Mail, Dubious Documents and Other Art from Ephemera.”

“I
love the idea of a creativity that honors the effects of
time and makes mischief with history,” Bantock writes.

Along
with Chabon, other fiction contributors to the Spring 2004
issue include E.L. Doctorow, whose novels Billy Bathgate
and Ragtime both
won National
Book Critics Circle Awards, and Stuart Dybek, poet and short-story
author, whose
work appears frequently in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The
Atlantic Monthly and Best American Short Stories anthologies.

A
published poet, with several national awards to his credit, Genoways
has a soft spot in his heart for poetry. He has expanded that
section and plans
to
feature a broad range of recognized and emerging talents. In
the Winter 2004 issue, early 20th century translations of
C.P. Cavafy
by Aliki
Barnstone and an essay by Michael Collier, “On Translating
Medea,” signal Genoways’ interest
in publishing poetry in translation.

Perhaps
some of the biggest editorial changes can be seen in the
area of nonfiction.

While
Blackford favored historical essays, Genoways enjoys more
contemporary pieces, especially those
with an international
angle
or strong personal
imprint. In the Spring 2004 issue, the travel section, Dispatch,
features two striking,
first-person pieces, “Capturing Saddam” by Carleton
J. Phillips, who spent time in Bagdad for the State Department’s
Office of Proliferation Threat Reduction, and “Inside
Saddam’s Spider Hole,” a photo
essay and commentary by photojournalist Chris Hondros.

Also
noteworthy is a personal essay by Kathleen Spivack, “Some
Thoughts on Sylvia Plath,” who relates her experience
in a poetry class taught by Robert Lowell at Boston University
in 1959. The students included Plath who,
according to Spivack, was well read, definite in her opinions
and had “absolutely
no sense of humor.”

Genoways
appreciates good science writing and plans to publish some
from time to time, such
as the piece, “Wonderful Life: Debating Evolution
in the Age of DNA” by Edward J. Larson, who won
the Pulitzer Prize for history in 1997.

In
another new move, Genoways has carved out space for
a Writing Life feature in the back of the book. In
the current
issue,
Jahan Ramazani,
professor
of English at the University of
Virginia, writes about the challenges he faced editing
the most recent edition of The Norton Anthology of
Modern and
Contemporary Poetry.

Book
review essays and short reviews, now signed by the writers,
still appear, but take up less space
than
before.

The
Winter 2004 issue of the “National
Journal of Literature & Discussion,” the
first VQR issue that Genoways designed from start
to finish, focused on the upcoming 50th anniversary
of Brown v. Board of Education. Featured on its
cover is the
striking 1964 Norman Rockwell painting, “The
Problem We All Live With,” of
a black girl, guarded by federal marshals, walking
to school. The issue includes personal recollections
of the days of racial desegregation by author Toni
Morrison
and an interview of Oliver W. Hill, a lawyer on
the Brown legal team, by civil rights leader Julian
Bond.

The
Summer 2004 issue will feature emerging writers.

Theodore
E. Genoways

Genoways
is VQR’s youngest editor. He
was born in Texas and reared in Pittsburgh. He received a bachelor’s
degree in English from Nebraska Wesleyan in 1994, a master’s
degree in English from Texas Tech University in 1996, and a master’s
degree in English at the University of Virginia in 1999. While
a student at U.Va., he founded the literary journal, Meridian.
His subsequent
work experience includes stints with the Minnesota
Historical Society Press, Callaloo, a journal of African, African-American
and Afro-Caribbean arts and
letters, the Virginia Festival of the Book
and Texas Tech University Press. He is currently working on a
doctorate
in English from the University of Iowa.

Genoways
has received numerous honors for his poetry, including a
2002 Pushcart Prize,
the
Natalie Ornish
Poetry Award
and a John Ciardi
Fellowship
in Poetry.
His work has been published by Shenandoah
and Southern Poetry Review.

He
has put a new poetry board in place at the VQR, consisting
of Chairman David Lee
Rubin,
Angie Hogan
and Karen Kevorkian.

VQR
Web Site
The new VQR Web site — http://www.virginia.edu/vqr —has
been totally redesigned and expanded to incorporate many new features.

The
full content of the current issues
now are posted on the Web site. For
the time
being, access
is free.
Visitors
to the
site
also may subscribe
to
VQR online
or donate to the publication to support
related activities, which include a
scholarship program
for the University
of Virginia Young Writers
Program and
an award program
for writers. A selection of local literary
events also is posted.

Links
to related sites include literary magazines, general magazines,
online
magazines, book
reviews, organizations
for writers and
digital archives.

At
VQR, plans are underway to create online archives to post
content from
back issues.
Since 1925,
VQR has published
a
virtual Who’s Who of authors.
It counts D. H. Lawrence and Andre
Gide among its first contributors,
and has published
many others, including Aldous Huxley,
Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, Thomas
Wolfe, Eleanor Roosevelt, Jean-Paul
Sartre, Bertrand Russell, H.L.
Mencken, Robert Frost
and George Kennan.

VQR
Prize Winners for 2003
Recognizing the impact of inflation
on the writing life, the VQR
has doubled the monetary
awards
for its annual
Emily Clark
Balch
Prizes,
awarded for
short fiction and poetry, from
$500 to
$1,000 each. The journal also
has established a new prize in
short
nonfiction in
honor of Staige Blackford, also
in the amount
of
$1,000.

VQR
Prize winners for 2003 are:

Emily
Clark Balch Prize for Short Story – Enid Shomer
for “Chosen” (Winter)

Staige
Blackford Prize for Nonfiction - C. Knight Aldrich, M.D., for “A
National Disgrace” (Winter)
and James Axtell
for “What’s
Wrong — and
Right — with
American Higher
Education”(Spring).

For Writers
VQR is always
looking
for good writing
that
is both
intelligent and passionate,
according
to
Genoways.

“It’s
gotta have heart,” he says. “Without emotional
power,
a piece won’t make it into the magazine.”

Fiction
is highly
competitive. VQR
receives submissions
from the
country’s
top writers
and has
seen a
30 percent
increase in
submissions since
its new
Web site
went up
last December.
But one
of the
exciting aspects
of editing
a literary
journal is
discovering new
talent. So,
fiction writers
should feel
free to
submit, but
not be
discouraged if
they don’t
get in.

In
contrast, the
journal is
always short
of good
nonfiction. Currently,
Genoways is
commissioning two-thirds
of the
nonfiction pieces
that appear,
but hopes
that unsolicited
submissions will
increase. Three
opportunities in
short nonfiction
include the
VQR’s new Dispatch series, which features thoughtful
travel–style
essays on events and places in the news. The Writing
Life offers a place for personal essays of up to 2,500
words on some aspect of living with books, writers,
optimism and despair. Humor works. Also, personal essays
on a broad range of topics, from 3,000 to 7,000 words,
with a distinctive voice and an interesting
point of view. Any topic that engages current issues
will be considered. Again, humor is appropriate.

Writers
should anticipate
the news
cycle and
calendar year
as much
as possible,
submitting ideas
up to
six months
in advance
of desired
publication. In
some cases,
VQR can
respond quickly
to current
events and
publish material
received up
to one
month in
advance. But
generally, the
longer the
advance, the
better the
chances of
publication.

For
the Fall
2004 issue,
which will
be published
Sept. 7,
the submission
deadline is
June 1.
(No new
fiction will
be considered
between June
and September.)
For the
Winter 2005
issue, which
will be
published Dec.
15, the
deadline for
submission is
Oct. 1.

Genoways
plans to
publish a
special issue
every year
and a
half. The
next one
will appear
in the
Spring 2005
issue in
honor of
the 150th
anniversary of
the first
publication of
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.

Along
with other
changes in
the journal’s operations, VQR has increased
its payment rates. Writers now are paid $100
per published page for fiction and nonfiction
and $5 a line for poetry, with a minimum
payment of $200 for poetry.